Some Evidence from Theravada Buddhism

The intent of this article is to explore the extent to which we can apply to Buddhist ethics Martha Nussbaum's statement that "[l]iterary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is itself, a part of content - an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth" (Nussbaum 1990, 3). We explore the transformative impact that narratives can have on moral life, using examples from the story literature of Theravada Buddhist traditions in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Focusing on what Geoffrey Harpham has called "sub-ethics," the conditions that center moral life, we trace the ways in which narratives prefigure, configure, and refigure these conditions for human flourishing. it is not easy to specify - in a manner that both uses the first person plural and is responsible to the self-understanding of others - what are or should be among the proper concerns of an academic community studying Buddhist ethics. Even "Buddhist ethics" as the designation of a scholarly focus, one that can be the subject of a cluster of articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics, can generate considerable uncertainty for an uninitiated student of Buddhism or ethics who might happen to listen in on our collective discussions about the purposes of and methods for studying Buddhist ethics. Ours is a motley academic community that makes appeals both to cross-cultural interpretive perspectives that tend to highlight historical particularity and to universalist analyses that originated historically in the modern West. To the student of Buddhist cultural history, our community